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Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Intelligence as a Collective Enterprise

E Pluribus Unum

A few days before leaving the company in which I worked for many years as a chief software engineer, I went to visit my collegues in the data center of which we had become close friends through the years.

Constructed in the economic boom, the costly, high capacity, high available data center remained inactive until the end of the month when long processing executions ran.With the arrival of the economic crisis, the company is confronted with lower processing volumes, resulting in greater economic waste and resources to keep it going forward. In this period of uncertainty, to contain the losses due to high license costs (which by the way are not applicable to open source applications) and the infrastructure costs (also not applicable to the cloud) the management is forced to reorganize and decrease personnel.

The most sad part was to see the talent of the dedicated people that had worked for the company and now found themselves layed off, while the management rational being that a reduction in personnel would compensate for the losses incurred by the data center. The the first verse of the famous Allen Ginsberg’s s poem, Howl (may sound a bit too dramatic) some way it may help in describing a common situation of our times. Like Ginsberg did, I too looked back at the wonderful minds of my generation while they were withering like dried flowers.

In the successive months a number of personnel decided to leave the company with a mission to endeavor and offer technological initiatives in the hopes that history will not repeat itself. The strength of a union of many working collectively together which could also be applied to applications and business concepts is our idea of Cloud Computing.E pluribus unumsounds a well-known motto. Our version of the same idea sounds a bit more explicit,Intelligence is a collective enterprise.